Last night's chaos at a Jade star event, where eager fans shattered glass doors in their frenzy, was a tableau that would have made a Roman senator weep—or laugh. The authorities, of course, praised the 'British crowd management protocols' that were 'upheld.' A fine example of bureaucratic doublespeak.
Let us call it what it was: a predictable outcome of a society that has traded stoic restraint for hysterical celebrity worship. The glass doors did not break because of poor engineering; they broke because the herd has lost its sense of proportion. We have become a nation that treats a pop star's appearance as a moment of historical significance, while our industrial base crumbles and our intellectual elite babble about identity.
The real scandal is not the broken glass, but the broken hierarchy of values that led to it. We live in an age of decadence, my friends. The fall of Rome was preceded by bread and circuses.
Here we have smartphones and shattered doorways. The lesson is clear: when a society loses its sense of the ridiculous, it soon loses everything else. The protocols held, they say.
Yes, and Nero fiddled. The glass will be replaced. But the crack in the British psyche?
That will remain.
